Before EA, official sports titles were more spread out, and used in all kind of ways. Games like NBA Jam are hard to come by these days (barring updates to NBA Jam). Before annual installments of Year of the Same Game, you had crazy sports game ideas that were one and done. These weren’t simulators, like we have today, but imaginitive riffs on the sports to make up for any technical proficiency that hardware
of the time may have had. And that’s what makes them Rad Sports Games. Vinnk and Sean talk about their favorite titles, including the aforementioned NBA Jam, Punch Out, Bases Loaded (and a bunch of other weird baseball games), and even Scotti Pippen’s Slam City! If you’ve never played it before, why… it sure is something else. Will we ever see their like again? Aside from EA picking up the IP for NBA Jam from Midway, that is…

Leave your own voicemail at 608-492-1923, or just share your thoughts in the show notes at FamicomDojo.TV:
http://famicomdojo.tv/podcast/86

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The Wii U Pro Controller presents two problems: 1) It’s just like the Wii Classic or Wii Classic Pro Controllers: the adoption rate is poor, nothing that works on it NEEDS to work on it, and we totally forget about it. 2) It actually takes off, and threatens one of the core value propositions of the Wii U. Only Nintendo makes games for it, and 3rd parties just ignore it after a while. Vinnk and Sean discuss the problem of hardware fragmentation in video game systems, and trot out some well-worn examples as well as more recent ones: the Sega Genesis 32x, Android’s newest Ice Cream Sandwich operating system, and more!

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